Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.
6,499 karma · joined August 9, 2024
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?
Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.
Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?
There might be some survivorship bias there.
I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.
You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?
Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.
Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!
Not when life is filled with warfare, murdering other people, and having loved ones killed?
Some systems have dedicated crypto co-processors for confidentiality (encryption) - e.g., I think drives with FDE, and I think Apple Silicon SoCs might have them. Can those be repurposed for hash calculation? What about systems that lack them?
> Allegedly, Signalgate was caused by Apple helpfully mapping the wrong number to a name.
In what system is Apple mapping numbers to names? The address book is maintained by users. An AppleID? How could that happen? And it would seem to result in many errors before the Signal error.
I thought it was simply caused by someone adding the wrong person to the chat?
> The Intercept
Per that article, the cause is unknown. The speculated cause in the article is that The Intercept somehow lost control of the user id, and Signal recycles user ids. That seems like a bad practice generally and with this predictable consequence, and especially bad for an application people trust with security.
> Twilio
This was Twilio employees caught by a phishing attack. I wonder what more secure, and affordable, options Signal has. Operate their own SMS infrastructure - would that be more secure that Twilio's? Use something besides SMS - would on-boarding become too hard? Stop using phone numbers - they need some spammer and bot filter, so what replaces it?
> Russian State-Backed Hackers
A phishing attack on Signal users, using a QR or link to make the attacker a linked device. That setup seems risky for non-technical users; I wonder how Signal could better secure it.
That and other attacks are described here. The other attacks all require compromising the device on which Signal is installed:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...
Isn't it? I think it has a setting, disabled by default, to proxy connections via a Signal server. If you're not doing that ... it must be P2P? Probably with the IP address of the person you're communicating with in the header of every packet?
"let them" could imply that the LLMs wanted to do it.
The intent is on the part of the people. The LLMs did it because OpenAI/Anthropic intended them to do it and designed them to do it, and we can assume specifically instructed them to do it.
As the people controlling the machine, and as the world's leading experts, I think we can assume intent until proven otherwise.
Notice other bad behavior, which would be undesireable to the vendors, doesn't happen: How about simple rudeness? Trolling lies? SHOUTING!
I know plenty of non-technical users on Signal. Based on news reports, it's used widely by activists. I see journalists advertising their Signal contact information for tips. It's recommended government-wide in the US by CISA and is pre-installed on US intelligence community computers, including in the CIA.
While I disagree with these critiques of Signal, the surveillance networks can capture metadata - who talks to who and when - without breaking E2E. The metadata is as valuable as the data.
I think Signal has a feature to protect users, but I can't imagine how it works if the attacker can see all parties' Internet connections.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_-
Authoritative source: POSIX.1-2024 standard, sec. 3.265 Portable Filename Character Set
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/basedefs/V1...
Could you give an example of an actual attack of this kind on Signal? The 'Signalgate' event was someone mistakenly inviting the wrong person to a chat.
There are third-party forks and clients. Parts of the US government use one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678919
Also, you can audit the code.
Discord is used by a narrow group of technically literate people. Signal is for everyone. Your grandparents probably don't use Discord, but if they can text then they can use Signal.
On a smaller scale, it's clear that Signal believes a functioning address book is necessary for end user adoption. For example, by default Signal notifies you of people in your phone contacts who are on or who later join Signal.
> Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions
I have yet to see a solution better than the one they chose, for their requirements. Notice that there are none in this discussion.
Almost all private cars are unmonitored (in this respect).
I expect that genetics, age, and/or breed affect human expectations of the horse (e.g., 'this breed is aggressive'), which affects how they treat the horse, which affects personality.
Same with dogs. Pit bulls encounter lots of fear and human aggression, and are used for aggressive purposes by humans who expect that.
Same with humans, sadly.
A messaging service filled with bots and spammers is not usable, and possibly not affordable to Signal (what proportion of resources would be spent on spam/bots). What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Lots of security geeks want Signal to adopt practices unusable to the public. They've made clear that unsusable security is not in their mission.
> Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this?
Very few FOSS projects receive seven figures in donations, and dependably enough to budget for them. Good for you; you guys do great work.
Security depends on trust, as you know: Very few users can audit GrapheneOS's code for themselves, and of those people, very few have time to do it. People must trust you to use GOS and for the world to benefit from your efforts. Everything you post on HN relies on trust - almost nobody is checking on it.
IMHO trust requires naming funders, for any organization; secretly funded organizations bringing in millions raise lots of questions. If you don't want to name exact amounts, you could follow many non-profits' practice and name them in ~ logarithmic tiers: $1-100, $101-1,000, $1,001-10,000, etc.
> Cape
Cape is part of the Thiel family (or maybe extended family) of companies. That doesn't condemn them; I'm not expressing an opinion; but realistically it's not a confidence-builder for many people (which is too bad because Cape seems like the most secure service provider I've seen).
Good luck!
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
> Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025.
That's not enough for 14 devs, plus infrastructure, etc.
> There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project.
They should make their financing public (and maybe they do), being a non-profit and also asking people to trust them with their security. Funding provides influence: if 50% came from adtech or public surveillance companies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, etc.), then people would have questions.
That's great. How can a FOSS project afford that? Where does GOS money come from? Did Daniel win the lottery?
"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
The issue always is, was the de-identification effective?
With a birtdate, gender, and zip code, ~85% of Americans can be uniquely identified.[0] Much data contains much more unique information than that; I imagine most data about you has identifiable fingerprints - where you go, what you bought at the grocery store, your medical conditions, movies you watch, music you listen to, entertainment choices, hobbies, etc.
An LLM is the perfect tool to identify someone based on that data.